Brave Browser – another non-ad web alternative?

 Brave is a web browser that has been about for while, but i only happened across it when it made its way onto the android platform.

It presents another concept which supports web content creators without subjecting viewers to horrendous ads, both in their content and in their speed detriment.

Check their site out here – https://brave.com

Crypto mining failed me (see coin hive here), ads are annoying and more and more likely to be blocked via various plugins and tools. The Brave browser blocks all ads by default and builds up a profile on where you are spending your time on the web. Contributions are then made to the various sites if they are registered to the “BAT” system, which is a way of rewarding the content providers.

My very brief experience so far has been positive, a fast browser which support all my chrome plugins – but with all ad-blocking etc built in. For the extra paranoid it also includes a private mode that utilizes ToR network. Oh and it has a web torrent client built in.

A pretty good summary / review here – https://coiniq.com/brave-browser-review/

Update;

It seems ad’s may be coming to the browser, but so far it looks as though they are “opt-in”. I’ve updated brave link above with referral ;)

moving wordpress to http2 (via https)

    

I just moved my wordpress site to http2 (via https). Some advice on steps to moving your site ;

  • Run it behind nginx + lets encrypt – offload ssl certs and get http2 performance
  • Setup nginx default to redirect all http -> https
  • update your WordPress site to correct URL (via admin / settings / general)  i.e. https://sigtar.com
  • Run WP plug-in to change all media / links to new https links. Else you get mixed secuirty (some http, some https)

zfs – now has dedup!

Cool. zfs as of version 21 has deduplication built in. And thats the good dedup – synchronous dedup. i.e. deduped on the fly!

How easy is it to turn on? – very!

Once you have upgraded your zpool to 21 or above you can run the following command at the pool level and deduplication will be over all your data from that point onwards.

zpool set dedup=on tank

Done

Note : Watch your performance, it will drop like a rock if you do not have enough ram for your dedup tables. Do some tests after enabling this feature.

http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+zfs/dedup

HDD short stroking – is it worth it?

I’ve got some old 250Gb drives that are starting to show their age. I’ve currently got them setup in a 3x RAID 0 config which presents about 750Gb of space.

I’ve got everything on a single partition (meh, i’m lazy). I’ve done various speed tests in the current setup (with all space allocated), but i thought i’d re-image onto a short stroke partition.

I only use about 150Gb of space on my main machine (most of my data is on another box), so i’m going to try creating a 200Gb partition to test if this provides any kind of performance boost.

So reducing my raid 0 from 750Gb to 214Gb, and here are the results…

Before with all 750Gb presented…

Same disks but short stroked to 214Gb….

Conclusion : Yip, seems like its worth it if you have the spare space. Average throughput is up by 10MB/s and seek has improved by almost a third loosing 4ms.

You will get even more of an improvement if you can use a smaller % of capacity per drive and / or more drives for your stripe.

Updated : 07/02/2010

btw – the above was without write-back cache enabled…. if i turned that on i got the following…

OpenSolaris – iSCSI

Want iSCSI in opensolaris?

Grab SUNWiscsitgt via package manager.

enable the server via svcadm;

svcadm enable iscsitgt

create your zfs iscsi pool;  (this command will limit iscsi drive to 500GB in size)

zfs create -V 500G tank/iscsi

set isci on via zfs command;

zfs set shareiscsi=on tank/iscsi

check that target is up and running;

iscsitadm list target -v

Done. Should be able to connect via ip from another machine. I have not covered CHAP or any client side configuration. Assumed isolated LAN.

HDTune_Benchmark_SUN_____SOLARIS